Bill's Bad Bet

摘要

The stock market has a brutal way of making even the smartest people look foolish. Just ask Bill Miller, America's most celebrated mutual fund manager, whose Legg Mason Value Trust has beaten the S&P 500 stock index for 14 years running. A brilliant polymath whose intellectual passions range from chaos theory to Wittgenstein, Miller has trounced his rivals by thinking differently. But lately the investor, who is based in Baltimore, Md., has looked a tad less clever. In the past two years, oil and gas stocks surged as the price of oil nearly tripled, to $70 per bbl., yet Miller missed the entire runup. "It's a mistake we should not have made," he says, and he's paying for it. With Value Trust down 2.2% this year, he's trailing the S&P by 4 percentage points and is in danger of losing his unrivaled streak.